Yes, Virginia, There is a Self-Mutilation Kit
In Your Legislative Stocking
José de la Isla   [Photo]

The anti-immigrant mania gripping state legislatures around this country has plummeted to new depths. Anything goes if it shows our utter distain for— make that irrational thinking about— undocumented immigrants. And that includes self-mutilation.

Case in point: the Virginia House Education Committee moved a bill this month that clearly contradicts this nation’s better interests. It goes far beyond the current coast-to-coast rage to charge hundreds of Latino and Latina high school graduates ten times or more in tuition than what their classmates pay. There are hundreds of such students who came to this country as infants, spent all their school years in the same state thinking they were U.S. citizens, only to find out otherwise at college matriculation time.

But at least they’re not barred at the door.

The Virginia education committee has voted in support of a bill by Delegate Frank D. Hargrove Sr. to prevent undocumented immigrants from applying to college. Period.

No other state to our knowledge has considered or passed similar blanket eligibility denials to higher education.

A large Latino and Jewish alliance traveled to Richmond from throughout the state this month to lobby unsuccessfully against the measure in committee.

Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, speaking for the Hispanic organizations, stressed that the bill could destroy future contributions of young immigrants who were brought here unaware by their parents.

The plain fact is that a portion of our young people’s lives can be wrecked, rearranged or damaged to our own detriment.

We have been warned since the mid-‘80s that this nation must produce more and more well-educated students as we approach a 3-to-1 worker-to-retiree ratio. When these students graduate and enter the work economy, we need them to prop up Social Security, or some semblance of it as we know it. Not long ago, workers were double that number. Now workers must be better educated to become more productive.

Texas state demographer Steve Murdock has made it abundantly clear that for his state: unless college enrollments hit record highs and its Hispanic and black students populations are trained and educated well, the Lone Star States’ economy will stagnate — and poverty will rise three percent by 2015.

That’s a scary proposition for one of our most prosperous states, one that enjoys some of the highest international trade volumes in the country and is looking at nanotechnology for its future. Plain-spoken on the subject, Murdock is saying that anyone standing in the way of providing genuine educational access for already-underserved blacks, Latinos and immigrants — is just plum working against his own interest.

The Houston Community College System, one of the country’s largest with more than 50,000 students, for instance, is trying to expand its enrollments by seeking all eligible students from local high school graduates. When those students graduate, they are ready to pump about $1 billion into the local economy. Every time a college misses its enrollment goal, the economy experiences a $6,443 loss per student.

By now it is virtually cliché to say that we need 80 percent of the workforce with a postsecondary education to keep the national economy strong. One would think President Bush, a former Texas governor, had this in mind when he pressed his competitiveness agenda in the State of the Union last month and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutiérrez was out pitching the idea the next day.

What could possibly feed the anti-immigrant spirit?

Mike Davis, University of California, Irvine, professor in his groundbreaking book Magical Urbanism, pointed out six years ago how immigrant settlements saved many of our major central cities from their own dilapidation by moving into those abandoned places and building a thriving economy where only drunks and derelicts dared to tread.

Now, many of these places have become showplaces for the new urbanism, with downtown clubs, restaurants, loft living, and downtown stadiums. Places immigrants themselves cannot afford are areas many of them pioneered anew. Billions – some say trillions – were saved by the simple inner city resettlement, making our thriving urban showplaces what they are today.

Why can’t our peace-of-mind dividend to their risk-taking parents, aunts and uncles go to young, deserving students, extended through education? Does the immigration status of their parents really matter? This nation will continue reaping the benefits of their persistence.

Besides all that jazz about “what don’t you understand about the term ‘illegal,’” didn’t the group lobbying in Virginia already prove how “American” they really are? In the United States, you assimilate by joining others to push for a worthwhile purpose.

That’s what happened when the Latino-Jewish coalition rolled into Richmond to ask that our immigrant students be given a chance. To Virginia’s detriment as well as its shame, the pseudo-patriots on the legislative committee were using a different yardstick to judge the students.

(José de la Isla is contributing editor with Hispanic Link News Service. He can be reached by e-mail at jdelaisla@houston.rr.com)

© 2006 Hispanic Link News Service
2/12/06
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